Pierced Eardrums

Abstract

Emerging in the wake of the broad paradigm of semiotics in discourses in the human sciences in France in the 1960s, and from other developments and emergent tendencies in philosophy and critical theory, a cluster of works in French thought of the 1970s, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Roland Barthes, investigate the liminal spaces and dynamic relations between sense, sound, and noise. Depending on the angle adopted, these investigations bear upon the relations between articulated sound and noise; language and sound, the formed and the unformed, the coded and the non-coded, sound and music, sound and silence, and other formulations of acoustic liminality. This article brings to light how noise is an operative concept across this material; I argue for its pertinence to the question of the “mental state of noise” as elaborated by Steven Sands and John Ratey in their seminal piece “The Concept of Noise,” and then critically assessed by Cécile Malaspina in The Epistemology of Noise.

Keywords:

• thresholds
• Roland Barthes
• Jean-François Lyotard
• Deleuze and Guattari
• post-semiotic
• noise

In 1986, psychologist Steven Sands and psychiatrist John Ratey published an article in the journal Psychiatry titled “The Concept of Noise,” which proposed what they called the “state of ‘noise’” (290) to have a broad diagnostic “applicability” across a wide spectrum of mental illnesses and experiences. Sands and Ratey defined this state as “an internally experienced state of crowding and confusion created by a variety of stimuli, the quantity, intensity and unpredictability of which make it difficult for individuals so afflicted to tolerate and organize their experience” (290). They qualify it further as a “state of inner confusion and terror” (291) resulting from an excess of external or internal stimuli, which overwhelm the subject’s capacity to integrate, control, and maintain a “continuous sense of self” (295). Following the great German neurologist Kurt Goldstein, Sands and Ratey describe the response to this excess as a withdrawal or retreat to a “lower level of adaptation” or a “more constricted form of organization” (291). The resulting “rigid attitude or approach” (ibid.), however, only exacerbates the catastrophic reaction; “behaviors designed to relieve, control, or avoid internal disorder, […] are apt to contribute to the confusion they are meant to reduce, disrupting especially the ability to recognize affect and to communicate about felt experience in relations with others” (ibid.).

In her landmark book The Epistemology of Noise, Cécile Malaspina has pointed to the way in which, while inevitably oriented towards the “pharmacological containment” of the effects of noise (170), Sands and Ratey’s article is symptomatic of the uneasy epistemological status of noise, which is manifest “at the edge of reason” (172); she observes that this is evident in the use of the term to refer to both the cause and the effect of the “catastrophic reaction” at stake. For Malaspina, noise has the capacity to reveal “some of the fault lines and paradoxes […] within the constitution of the rational subject” (ibid.). As an example of such paradoxes, Malaspina identifies a tension between Sands and Ratey’s proposition that patients prone to the kinds of overloading they consider are “always wide open” and “prone to flooding” (291) yet respond by withdrawing to a “narrower” state of lesser “flexibility” (292). Malaspina follows this through with extensive consideration of Keats’ notion of “negative capability,” alluded to by Sands and Ratey (ibid.), and this leads her to advocate “the courage of allowing the representative structures of one’s own ‘self’ to dissolve” (Malaspina 182). Negative capability thus appears as a “knowing risk” or “voluntary” or “strategic” “de-differentiation of identity” (183), and one can infer that experiencing or embracing noise and the loss of control it occasions may also be considered a risk, to be confronted with courage.

I will be concerned in this article with a parallel argument bearing upon other historically and culturally distinct strategies of de-differentiation, which also revolve around conceptions of noise and the thresholds of pertinence and cognition. Less obviously framed within the psychiatric and therapeutic contexts in which Sands and Ratey intervene, and necessarily more limited in scope than Malaspina’s engagement with the epistemology of noise, my contention is that the material discussed here throws interesting light upon the problematic of noise and the theoretical and existential strategies it occasions.

Emerging in the wake of the broad paradigm of semiotics in discourses in the human sciences in France in the 1960s, and from other developments and emergent tendencies in philosophy and critical theory, a cluster of works in French thought of the 1970s investigate the liminal spaces and dynamic relations between sense, sound, and noise. Depending on the angle adopted, these investigations bear upon the relations between articulated sound and noise; language and sound, the formed and the unformed, the coded and the non-coded, sound and music, sound and silence, and no doubt other formulations of acoustic liminality. To select some examples, non-exhaustively, one can point to Roland Barthes’ sustained pursuit of what he would call, after Kristeva, significance, in the “grain of the voice” (“Grain of the Voice” 185, 181), in the “body which beats” (“Rasch” 299), in the “inflexemes” and “explosemes” of the discourse of Proust’s character Charlus (How to Live Together 165–67), or in the “hum” (bruissement) of language (“Rustle of Language” 76).¹ In the work of Jean-François Lyotard we can note an attention to the “silence” of the death drive (“Several Silences” 91), and to the noise(s) that erupt(s) in its violent “indisposition” of the phenomenological, compositional body as a further example of a drive to identify and gain (or deliberately lose) purchase on the instances of the edge of cognition, form, and intelligibility (93). Lyotard’s later writing, in Soundproof Room, on “stridency,” “at the threshold of the audible” moves in the same direction (76). Finally, Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on the “active neutralization of sense” at work in the writings of Franz Kafka (Kafka 21), through the use of a language which tends towards the abolition of sense and musicality, contributes to a constellation of material which bears both directly and obliquely on the “state of noise” and the frontiers of cognition. I will argue in this essay that, despite their apparent differences in terms and in aims, what is at stake across all of these discussions are the frontiers of cognition, the limits of psychic organization and meaningful, identifiable sense, the capacity of the organism to engage with phenomena as material for interlocution, and a strategic use of noise to test and push the limits of the sensible. Moreover, I will propose that despite their apparent indifference to or rejection of psychoanalytic theory, these writings exhibit a consistent emphasis on subtle differentiations of modes of listening that are broadly and sometimes explicitly informed by the psychoanalytic clinic.

I contend then that this cluster of materials engages with what I will call the problematic of noise in a distinctive and sustained manner. If the semiotics of the 1960s was shaped by and differentiated from its partial derivation from information theory and cybernetics (see Geoghagen), its primary motivation was to establish a fundamental model of communication between sender and receiver on the basis of which the different components of the message itself could be identified, categorized, and analysed.² Later post-semiotic developments would critique the rigidity of the informational and semiotic model from multiple perspectives, including its determination, despite appearances, by the metaphysics of presence (Derrida), its foreclosure of the “speaking subject” (Kristeva), its disregard for the figural aspects of representation (Lyotard, Discourse), and its over-emphasis on language as the fundamental matrix of sense (Deleuze and Guattari, “November 20”).

The work of Roland Barthes, who had done so much to promote semiology (of the Saussurean mould) as a transferable model for diverse means and media of communication, offers a representative trajectory toward the identification and affirmation of elements of sense that escape the semiotic paradigm, which exist at its edges. Barthes’ study of the “Text” (“From Work to Text”), as a mobile process of signifiance, then of the “obtuse sense” (“Third Meaning” 54) in certain photograms from the films of Eisenstein, resistant to naming but nonetheless “within interlocution” (61), then of the breaks and cuts in the pleasurable reception of works of literature (Pleasure of the Text), where they provoke the shudder of jouissance, and more – these directions may be understood as so many attempts to name and conceptualize the supplement; sitting both inside and outside the structure of sense and intelligibility, opening out its “structurality” to the Nietzschean play of force, affect, and contingency (Derrida 352).

Barthes’ work in these directions may nevertheless be considered to insist on this side of the limit. This proposition can be understood in explicit relevance to the acoustic phenomenon of noise, but also to its connotations of contingency and unpredictability. That Barthes’ analysis of the “Charlus-discourse,” that is of the values or investments manifest in Proust’s character’s “holding forth,” revolves around the identification of the “inflexemes” or “explosemes” of his vocal performances suggests, through the suffix -eme, that there is continuity with Barthes’ earlier semiological intent to name and analyse the “units of the discourse” (“Structuralist Activity” 216), the condition of any semiotics or structural analysis. One might suggest that already to name or even to circumscribe this unit, as a “noiseme,” for example (Burger et al.), is to distort the object and exclude its non-formed character, its force and its affect. There is thus, in Barthes’ endeavours to find the “grain of the voice,” or to hear the pulsional body in Schumann’s Kreisleriana, which he otherwise considers intractable to any grammar, theme, or meaning (“Rasch” 299), an inherently tragic dimension: to grasp that which flees, having been projected, dreamed, and imagined as always in flight.³

Perhaps this tragic dimension is inevitable, given Barthes’ sustained attention to the interlocutory dimensions of phenomena, to the intersubjective aspects of the problematic of noise. In a 1977 co-authored contribution with Roland Havas to the Encyclopédie Einaudi he sets out what is at stake in the “modern” approach to listening (écoute), as distinct from the purely physiological category of hearing (entendre) (Barthes, “Listening” 245). Listening, Barthes explains, can be approached from three different angles, to each of which pertain a different aspect of the acoustic object. At the first level, the organism (human or animal) attends to the indices of the environment, relating predominantly to aggressivity or fear, but also potentially to attachment, in any case to primordial aspects of survival (246–47). At a second level the subject interprets these indices, which by this token become signs, these signs being coded and subject to a deciphering (245). The third level engages the play of demand and desire; it operates in an intersubjective space, and the method appropriate to it is the cornerstone of clinical psychoanalysis: transference (246).

Speaking anthropologically, Barthes situates the sense of audition as primarily relevant to the appropriation of space, that is to territory, and relates this to the emotive and existential terms of familiarity, recognition, and security, as well as the various threats to this capacity to “communicate effectively with its Umwelt” (“Listening” 247), potentially alluding here to the ethological work of Jakob von Uexküll. This illuminates, as if in the negative, Barthes’ sense of the importance of listening with regard to territory: it is a “mode of defense against surprise” (247), a prior attentiveness or vigilance with regard to anything that could disrupt this territorial security. Its object is the threat or a need (both of which can arise internally and externally, one might add). Listening also has a selective or filtering function, moreover:

it receives the greatest possible number of impressions and channels them toward a supervisory centre of selection and decision; the folds and contours of its shell seem eager to multiply the individual’s contact with the world yet to reduce this very multiplicity by submitting it to a filtering trajectory [parcours de tri]. (248)

Listening has the primary, “morphological” function to transform indifferent or indistinct nature into an identifiable “form” (248). Barthes thus accords to listening a crucially defensive, selective, and formative function; its purpose is to pre-emptively identify threats or needs with a view to its own adaptation or action, but also crucially to filter out what is indifferent, what does not merit the category of intelligible form. Implicitly this selective and formative function draws a line and establishes a threshold of relevance or “pertinence” between sensory information which demands form, and the un-formed noise of indifferent nature (Sands and Ratey 291). The first level of listening, in Barthes’ matrix, “transforms noise into index” (“Listening” 252).

Things do not remain at this level, evidently, and Barthes’ history of listening departs from the level at which the organism, human or animal, attends to the signals from the environment (internal or external, again) relevant for its survival, to consider the strictly human dimensions of rhythm, and of the decoding of auditory signs supposed as secrets of the divine or of the self. Religious history and confessional practice in particular inform the shaping of listening as a specifically interlocutory and transferential relation between one subject and another: “The injunction to listen is the total interpellation of one subject by another: […] it creates transference: ‘listen to me’ means touch me, know that I exist” (Barthes, “Listening” 251). The demand or injunction to listen, and the aptitude or acceptance to listen thus become part of the interlocutory play between two subjects (or more), a matter of command, plea, submission, or gift. It is on this basis that Barthes comes to consider psychoanalytic listening: “Interpellation leads to an interlocution in which the listener’s silence will be as active as the locutor’s speech: listening speaks, one might say: it is at this (either historical or structural) stage that psychoanalytic listening intervenes” (252).

Considering Freud’s account, in “Recommendations to Physicians” (1912), of the psychoanalytic technique of “evenly suspended attention” (111), Barthes cites at length Freud’s comparison of it with the apparatus of the telephone: just as the telephone transforms the “electronic oscillations” into sound waves, the analyst “reconstructs” the “unconscious” of the patient through attention to its “derivatives” (115–16). As Freud himself would no doubt admit, the paradigm at stake here is decidedly simplistic; it shapes psychoanalytic listening on the basis of the straightforward communication of a (coded) message, through the decoding or translation of a language which the analyst is supposed to know. The parallel with the model of information theory, which, we can recall, was developed by Shannon and Weaver in their report for the Bell Telephone Laboratory (1964), is instructive, for the latter model takes into account the differentiation of information from the noise which disturbs or obscures it, while Freud’s telephone metaphor excludes such noise. His “recommendation” of “evenly suspended attention,” however, requires the analyst specifically not to choose or select from “all that one hears” (Freud 111–12); one can infer that the requirement not to select obliges the analyst not to impose the filtering and formative operation which Barthes described in his consideration of the first level of listening. The ear of the analyst must be open to noise, before it is orchestrated as index, sign, or intelligible form.

Noting in passing that Freud himself was prone to disregard the advice he sets out here (“Listening” 254; specifically in the cases of Dora and the Wolf Man), Barthes then proposes that the specificity of psychoanalytic listening is an oscillation between the non-selective neutrality of evenly suspended attention and the requirements of “commitment” and “theory” (254). The ear of the analyst is as if attuned to the “resonance” of the singular insistence of a “major element” of the patient’s unconscious (254; Barthes citing Serge Leclaire). The “major element” to which the analyst’s ear is open is “a word, a group of letters referring to body movement: a signifier” (254). As we will see further on, Barthes (and Leclaire) may be thought guilty of a selection, denied as such, which privileges, “in the face of all that one hears,” the formal element of a signifier, an “element” or “unit of discourse,” emerging or insisting as if thematically from the noise of unconscious corporeal material; this element, moreover, is specifically linguistic, a word or a series of letters. And it finds “resonance” with the analyst. One can counter, and we will trace some arguments in this direction further on, that this is to thematize the unconscious, to give its noise and its contingency intelligible form, to select its elements (its minimal units) and to distinguish between those that are major or minor. It is moreover to thematize and form unconscious material specifically on the basis of a linguistic paradigm: to constrain the unconscious and its noise within the framework of the message sent from sender to receiver, in the form of a word or group of letters. For Barthes, as for Lacan, the unconscious is always already formed with and through signifiers. Psychoanalytic listening is a “means of trapping signifiers” [jeu d’attrape des signifiants] (256), where the motif of capture underlines the thematics of predation and constraint at work here.

The voice, for Barthes, is the pro-eminent movement of the body through which the subject can be heard. Through the voice “a whole psychology” and “way of being” can be discerned, not so much, of course, through what is said as through the “modulations and harmonics” of the voice itself (Barthes, “Listening” 254–55). Significantly, Barthes dissociates the (singing) voice from the breath: “the singing voice is not the breath but indeed that materiality of the body emerging from the throat, a site where the phonic metal hardens and takes shape” (255; la voix n’est pas le souffle, mais bien cette matérialité du corps surgie du gosier, lieu où le métal phonique se durcit et se découpe (189)). Using exactly the same terms in “The Grain of the Voice” (183), Barthes locates the subjective and affective tonality of the voice in the throat and mouth, the cast or mould in which, to follow his metaphor, the liquid metal of sound hardens and is shaped and cut. Respiration is a “myth,” he adds, and the lungs are a “stupid organ” which have no erectile capacity: “The lung, a stupid organ […], swells but gets no erection” (ibid.) [il se gonfle mais il ne bande pas (“Grain de la voix” 59)]. Through this poetics of the soft and the hard, the pneumatic and the metallic, Barthes displays his preference for the identifiable (phallic) signifier over the non-formed and non-articulated, the liminal site of the cut over the base matter of sound. It is to this already “psychological,” already cathected material that the analyst listens, in Barthes’ account.

Jean-François Lyotard adopts an ostensibly more radical approach to the problematic of noise, also through an engagement with Freudian concepts, in the essay “Several Silences,” originally published alongside Barthes’ “Grain of the Voice” essay in a special issue on psychoanalysis and music of the semiotically inflected musicological review Musique en jeu (1972). Lyotard establishes a more or less intransigent incommensurability between the Freudian primary and secondary processes, which he frames in terms of a consideration of the auditory conditions of silence, deafness, sound, and noise: if Freud says that the death drive is unheard and silent, for Lyotard this is because of the “deafness” of the libidinal economy to the rules of composition and the hierarchy of the organism (“Several Silences” 91). The death drive, then, is strictly inaudible because to hear requires that sounds be articulated, cathected, and organized. “A sound is a noise that is bound,” writes Lyotard: an (audible) sound is a noise which has been cut out from the continuum, already identified and related to an “articulation,” to and by a “set-up” or “device” (92) [un dispositif (“Plusieurs silences” 65)]. Like a phoneme, a sound has value only in its differential relation to other sounds. If the primary processes ever have an incursion into the dispositif of organized, composed sound, this is a violent irruption: “The death drive is marked by surges of tension, what Klossowski calls intensities, Cage events. Dissonances, stridences, positively exaggerated, ugly, silences” (92). Despite the common reference to Cage (see Barthes, “Listening” 259), Lyotard “goes further” than Barthes in the distinction between sound and its others; if for Barthes this relation may be considered one of supplementarity – unthematized, non-intelligible sound may still be heard as a stylistic accentuation, or grain, texture of the voice, for Lyotard an event of this kind can only be heard or sensed as an irruption, or is not heard at all.

This is perhaps because of a fundamental difference in terms of reference between the two thinkers. The site of the transformation of noise into sound, for Lyotard, is the phenomenological body, the site of the subject: “Phenomenology situates the body as a region where the sounds transform themselves into music, where the unbound (un-conscious) is bound, where noise becomes sonority” (“Several Silences” 92). Accordingly we may suspect that Barthes’ tendency to articulate and subjectivize the supplemental “grain of the voice” or “beat of the body” is a result of the fundamental phenomenological and subjective basis of his thinking, which, in his post-semiotic work, always starts with the body (“and what a body!”)⁴ and comes back to it. For Lyotard the phenomenological body, that is, the body as the site of experience, is already an organized and organizing body which filters and selects. It is an erotic body, which thus excludes its thanatological other, the death drive:

The phenomenological body is a body that composes, a body possessed with Eros. But to compose is always to filter out and to bind, to exclude entire regions of the sound world as noise and to produce “music” (that which is “audible”) with the input. The noises rejected by the body, be it a body that composes, are not heard. If they are, it is as dissonances, as flows of sound entering a device not prepared to receive them and transform them into music. The phenomenological body is a filter and requires, then, that whole sound regions be desensitized. (93)

The body, then, as a composed, organized, and eroticized site, filters and thus excludes noise which cannot be articulated as sound. Lyotard describes this as a “policing” (95) and extends this qualification to the “therapeutics” of psychoanalysis (106), which, he adds, is equivalent to “a reinforcement of discourse, discontinuity, rationality, law, silence-law, negativity.” Engaging critically with Schoenberg, serialism and the twelve-tone method, Lyotard goes on, liberally citing Cage, to establish a programme, of which a crucial step is to “establish all noise as sound”; to make it so that “silence as noise-sound of the involuntary body, the noise-sound of the libido wandering over bodies, ‘nature,’ […] must be heard” (108).

Somewhat provocatively, parodically even, then, Lyotard heroizes noise as a force that will disrupt the economy of the phenomenological body and the political economy that pertains to it (a fuller discussion would develop this aspect). To put it rather crudely, if Barthes wants to eroticize noise, Lyotard wants the chaos that comes with it, the irruption of what in other works he will call the “inhuman.” Both Barthes and Lyotard situate their discussions of noise, sound, listening, and the heard in relation to psychoanalysis; while the former sees its potential to introduce a dynamic oscillation between thematized sense and its supplemental, bodily other, the latter stresses the disciplinary function of its therapeutics, to keep noise at bay in order to allow the body to function, erotically and otherwise.

In his last work Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics (2001), Lyotard makes a similar argument about the limits of the capacity of the phenomenological body to hear certain sounds, situated beyond its cognitive and perceptual threshold. The argument revolves around the word and phenomenon of stridency. Lyotard writes of stridency that it is “A front of sound so offensive that the frail membrane [the eardrum] fails to enter into resonance with it. It deafens it” (Soundproof Room 76). The “membrane” thus operates as a threshold, a defensive filter or blocking device: “Demarcating the field of the audible, [the] deafness [of the ear] protects it.” This threshold is not absolutely impermeable, however; stridency is not absolutely relegated to silence, but impacts upon the organism as disruption, and with violence: “The unheard-of is exhibited [l’inoui s’exhibe], in a flash, at the threshold of the audible” (76). Moreover, Lyotard proposes, the organism, the body or ego, desires its transgression by the strident scream, out of its anguish and humiliation at being “indentured to an organ and to an organisation” (78). There is thus a kind of urgent propulsion toward stridency, in which we might see a species of noise, which Lyotard expresses as a desire to “spur auditory receptiveness either beyond or before what is naturally allowed it.” Why? Lyotard’s response, always shadowing and implicitly commenting Malraux, is that the unheard, the “sound beyond sound” or “the other of all music” (78) teaches the ego the truth of its own cleavage, its finitude, and that this other sound, the noise beyond our perceptual threshold, promises something; that “a hearing of another kind will be given” (78), that “you shall hear the sounds to which your ear remains inert.” The condition of such an audition, however, is that “you exceed the bounds of listening by undergoing the martyrdom of my cruelty” (80); this hearing entails “the sacrifice of the ego.” Less bound, then, to the affective subject which Barthes (at least in my reading) seeks to position at the edges of intelligibility, but nevertheless within the limits of the phenomenological subject, Lyotard’s stridency entails a strategic, if no less felt, risk of the loss of agency and control akin to the negative capability evoked by Malaspina after Keats.

A similarly strategic usage of noise is proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In the opening chapter of their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), considering the apparent opposition in Kafka’s work between the figure of the bent head and its correspondence with the portrait photo, on the one hand, and the figure of the straightened head, and its relation to musical sound, on the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that with the latter instance it is not “systematized music or musical form” that interests Kafka as much as “pure sonorous material” (5). Whence numerous instances in Kafka’s work of a music, the authors develop, that is not played or is silent. However, Deleuze and Guattari continue, this is not a straightforward “semiotic” opposition, far less a dialectical one. With the kind of pure sonorous material at stake here we are dealing with a vector which tends towards the abolition of music:

What interests Kafka is a pure and intense sonorous material that is always connected to its own abolition – a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words – a sonority that ruptures in order to break away from a chain that is still all too signifying. In sound, intensity alone matters, and such sound is generally monotone and always nonsignifying. (6)

As if in keeping with the very intensification they seek to foreground and affirm in Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari’s language presses rhetorically outward, towards the limit; it is intensity “alone” that matters, in a movement away from a regime that is “still” and “all too” tied to Sense and to semantics. These may themselves be examples of what Deleuze and Guattari, after the linguist Vidal Sephiha, call an “intensive” use of language (22). This language also sets things in terms of a dynamic operation of form in relation to unformed material (matière non-formée): “sound doesn’t show up here as a form of expression, but rather as an unformed material of expression, that will act on the other terms” (6).

What is at stake then is a pure sonorous intensity that escapes from or does not get captured by form, but nevertheless has an effect on form.⁵ This opening informs Deleuze and Guattari’s overall approach to Kafka’s writing, in which “unformed matter” is brought to bear on form to liberate it from its territory, fixity, and solidity, from its semantic shackles. Unformed intensity acts upon form, then, to free it from content and all forms of semanticizing interpretation.

Further on, in the chapter “What is Minor Literature?,” the dynamics of (sonorous) form and non-formed matter is couched in terms of a series of deterritorializations and reterritorializations around the figure of the mouth:

In giving themselves over to the articulation of sounds, the mouth, tongue, and teeth deterritorialize. Thus, there is a certain disjunction between eating and speaking, and even more, despite all appearances, between eating and writing. Undoubtedly, one can write while eating more easily than one can speak while eating, but writing goes further in transforming words into things capable of competing with food. Disjunction between content and expression. (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 19–20)

If the “mouth, tongue, and teeth find their primitive territoriality in food,” the articulation of sounds in or by the mouth is a de-territorializing move, as if the move from the cutting, maceration, and swallowing of solid material to the propulsion, shaping, and cutting of air through vocalizations were to lift the mouth away from its immediate (animal) function of nutrition and the satisfaction of hunger, and from the earth-bound necessity and corporeally individuated ethos of the incorporation of food, liberating it for the flow of sound which passes into the milieu and between bodies, and between bodies and the milieu, eventually arriving at communication, though we are not there yet. So sounds, at least the sounds of the (animal or human) body, are a first or primary de-territorialization, in which sound “competes” with food, presumably as material for the mouth or of the mouth, for enjoyment (in the sense of use, pleasure, and affect). There is, Deleuze and Guattari write, “disjunction between content and expression”: food being content, which is ingested, incorporated, and excreted, and sound (but we are perhaps not yet with language) expression. Sounds may be heard as ex-pression: contra Barthes, there is perhaps a respiratory dynamic at stake here; after all the passage of food through the mouth is (usually) destined for swallowing, while the sounds of the body are made, at least at its orifices, through the ex-pression of air, the vowel as air, the consonant as its friction. The disjunction of content and expression may map onto that between the different economies of eating–digestion–excretion, on the one hand, and respiration–expression on the other, while the junctures between these economies have their sites in the burping or vomiting mouth, or the flatulent anus, or the mouthing/swallowing of words; stammering and mumbling as a reverse re-territorialization of language by eating, a direction exploited by Deleuze in other texts (“He Stuttered”). The disjunction, between food and sound, is the deterritorializing move, the first liberation of flow. However, this move is “compensated for,” as if there had to be balance; territory reclaiming its rights, by a “reterritorialization in sense” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 20). When sounds become language, air or breath becomes words, Sense reclaims its rights over sound. Deleuze and Guattari write that language, “ceasing to be the organ of one of the senses […] becomes an instrument of Sense” (20). As if language were, in its primary nature as breath-sound, a prosthesis of the body, an organ as such, intended to gain affect and intensity for the mouth, an organ which forms its “disjunctive synthesis” with air and flesh. But in its second nature as Sense, language designates and affects, and, moreover, has as its corollary, its secondary gain, so to speak, with the Subject of enunciation and of the énoncé. In this sense language ceases to be expressive to become “extensive and representative” (20).

There is then a third move: “Since articulated sound was a deterritorialized noise but one that will be reterritorialized in sense, it is now sound itself that will be deterritorialized irrevocably, absolutely” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 21). There is an apparent process and chronology here: articulated sound was deterritorialized noise, which then was reterritorialized as Sense (designation and its extensions in metaphor), only now to be deterritorialized again, but this time “absolutely.” From noise to sound to Sense to … what? Again, it is not music: “The sound or the word that traverses this new deterritorialization no longer belongs to a language of sense, even though it derives from it, nor is it an organized music or song, even though it might appear to be” (21). Music appears as a further, parallel, reterritorialization of sound, another language; but no, “organized music” is traversed, in Kafka, by a “line of abolition” “in order to liberate a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into a form” (21). What is this material which is connoted as vital, still expressive, but has no need of being put into a form? One might be tempted to think of it as form-less, but this is not a formlessness as primary sound liberated from the voracious, predatory mouth, the mouth that bites, chews, and sucks, but as non-formed material gained subsequently and strategically through the strategic abolition of Sense in language, which Deleuze and Guattari call an “active neutralization of sense” (21).⁶ This material, which eschews form and has no need of it, but is nevertheless ex-pression, “no longer finds its value in anything but an accenting of the word, an inflection.”⁷

Thus, with the motif of the inflecting of language, not unlike Barthes’ “grain” or the “inflexemes” of the Charlus-discourse, Deleuze and Guattari identify the liminal element toward which they propose Kafka shapes and “actively neutralizes” the territorial claims of sense and intelligibility. This also is a strategy rather than a submission. It eschews what Lyotard calls the policing function of “therapeutics,” a perspective which finds much sympathy with Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the oedipal tendencies of the psychoanalytic institution. Yet, in keeping with the ethos of Keats’ negative capability, this strategy is not an irresponsible embrace of madness and ill-health, of the “noisy state” described by Sands and Ratey, but comes out of the “courage” (Malaspina’s word) to accept loss and the dissolution of the boundaries of the self in order, perhaps, to gain more purchase on what lies at the edges of or outside the threshold of cognition. Conscious of the fact that this will open up more than it closes off or concludes, I would venture that this courage can be understood as aligned with Deleuze’s proposition, on the writer as the “physician of himself and of the world,” that: “The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums” (“Literature and Life” 3).

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Notes

1 Richard Howard offers “rustling” to translate Barthes’ bruissement; close reading of the essay which bears this title suggests a less vegetal, more machinic alternative, whence “hum.”

2 For an insightful comparative reading of information theory and post-structuralist or deconstructive approaches in literary analysis, see Katherine N. Hayles’ “Information or Noise?”

3 For a brilliant discussion of the auditory and musical dimensions of Barthes’ later work especially, see chapters 2 and 3 of T. Baldwin’s The Proust Variations.

4 “[A]nd what a body” [et quel corps!] is an exclamation Barthes introduces in (at least) two distinct instances, to describe Charlus (How to Live Together 155) and Schumann (“Rasch” 299), indicating both figures as exemplary, and as akin to Lyotard’s “soundproof room,” privileged sites for the excavation of the problematic of noise. I suggest this much of Barthes’ body.

5 Deleuze and Guattari scrupulously avoid (whether intentionally or not) the use of the word informe to refer to the “pure sonorous matter” in question, thus differentiating their perspective on form and its deterritorialization from that associated with Georges Bataille, whose entry under the title “Informe” (translated as “Formless”) in the “Critical Dictionary” of the review Documents has inspired much reflection on the destinies of the resistance to, subversion of or dissolution of form and the form of the concept (see Krauss and Bois; Didi-Huberman). As some have pointed out, and as Bataille’s introduction of the animal/material instances of the spider, the earthworm, and spit, in the text of “Informe” may invite us to infer, Bataille’s formless risks association with the abject, the object of phobia (see Krauss and Bois). This is not the direction taken by Deleuze and Guattari, whence my insistence on the distinction between formless/informe and non-formed/unformed/non-formée.

6 See above, on the informe.

7 It is worth pausing to consider some further detail of Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition of an “intensive utilization” of language. A footnote refers us to the work of Vidal Sephiha on “intensives,” mentioning also Lyotard’s account of what he called the “tensor,” from Libidinal Economy (1974). It is interesting to note that Vidal Sephiha’s study of language is closely related to an experience of political exile and linguistic marginality. As a Sephardi Jew born in Istanbul, and moreover one whose family were killed in the Nazi camps, while he survived internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sephiha turned to the study of Judeo-Spanish as a language of “agony.” The focus on the “intensive,” particularly as related to the expression of pain, is thus ineradicably tied to the question of “the people.” For Lyotard, meanwhile, the obsessive focus of semiotics on the “return” of language to the dimension of Sense needs to be countered and accompanied by an emphasis on the role of language as productive of intensities. In many ways Lyotard’s thinking here is a generally affirmative response to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972).